I've not interacted with GCP support very often, but I have used GCP extensively for the past 3 years coming from an AWS background previously.
All in all it's been a good experience and it's become my favourite cloud. I find the documentation spot on for the most part, and covering things in both approachable language and diving deep where needed.
The IAM system is easy to use, GKE workload identity works great, PubSub works a dream and Big Query is amazing (though pricey!). SDK's are well documented and generally have nice APIs as well.
We've had very little reason to need support, operating a bunch of GKE clusters, VPNs to various partners plenty of databases, buckets, message queues, etc (non trivial setup)
I do have some minor gripes that come to mind:
- Cloud SQL not having a richer API, I'd love to be able to manage postgres permissions by IAM group membership, and grant/revoke postgres roles using the rest API instead of connecting as a postgres user (it'd make secure automation via terraform etc easier if I could lean on IAM)
- VPC peering only allowing "one hop", which necessitates proxies even when using private service connect with two GCP products in some instances (eg: cloud SQL to datastream - why can't we just peer the two Google managed VPCs together? That would also avoid the proxy in our VPC)
- On datastream, why can't I grant a Google managed service account IAM access to postgres instead of configuring a user/pass based user?
- Why can't I configure a longer token expiration for artefact registry? When developing locally I don't want to reauth npm every 30 minutes
- Occasionally missing APIs prevent automation using terraform
So like anything it's not perfect but it also has felt like it's continuously improved overtime so I remain a happy developer
All in all it's been a good experience and it's become my favourite cloud. I find the documentation spot on for the most part, and covering things in both approachable language and diving deep where needed.
The IAM system is easy to use, GKE workload identity works great, PubSub works a dream and Big Query is amazing (though pricey!). SDK's are well documented and generally have nice APIs as well.
We've had very little reason to need support, operating a bunch of GKE clusters, VPNs to various partners plenty of databases, buckets, message queues, etc (non trivial setup)
I do have some minor gripes that come to mind:
- Cloud SQL not having a richer API, I'd love to be able to manage postgres permissions by IAM group membership, and grant/revoke postgres roles using the rest API instead of connecting as a postgres user (it'd make secure automation via terraform etc easier if I could lean on IAM)
- VPC peering only allowing "one hop", which necessitates proxies even when using private service connect with two GCP products in some instances (eg: cloud SQL to datastream - why can't we just peer the two Google managed VPCs together? That would also avoid the proxy in our VPC)
- On datastream, why can't I grant a Google managed service account IAM access to postgres instead of configuring a user/pass based user?
- Why can't I configure a longer token expiration for artefact registry? When developing locally I don't want to reauth npm every 30 minutes
- Occasionally missing APIs prevent automation using terraform
So like anything it's not perfect but it also has felt like it's continuously improved overtime so I remain a happy developer
(Edit: formatting)